Companies routinely spend millions of dollars on complex initiatives to improve leadership and increase teamwork. Leadership consultant and expert Peter Bregman demonstrates that there are more efficient, simpler ways to get there by offering innovative strategies, ideas and tools that empower everyone to contribute their maximum potential.

People who hear Peter speak often make simple changes that have an immediate and enormous impact on themselves personally and on their organizations. Organizational problems are often a series of personal problems and bad habits intersecting with each other. Peter helps organizations by helping individuals in very personal, constructive ways. From showing people a new, innovative path to productivity in 18 minutes a day, to helping people get out of their own—and other people’s—way in four seconds, to teaching people strategies for leading change without resistance, Peter does not just tell people how to improve teamwork, communication and productivity, he shows them how to do it.

Consistently the most-read blogger at Harvard Business Review, Peter is also the author of Point B: A Short Guide to Leading a Big Change and a contributor to five other books. His articles and commentary appear frequently in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Fast Company, Psychology Today, Forbes, CNN, NPR, FOX Business News, The Financial Times and PBS.

A SAMPLE OF SPEECH TOPICS:

Speech Topic 1:

Four Seconds: All the Time You Need to Replace Counter-Productive Habits with Ones That Really Work

The basic things we all want—to do good work, be successful, get along with others, produce value as part of a team—are surprisingly straightforward to achieve. But, more often than not, our knee-jerk reactions to the people and situations we face result in the exact opposite. We’re fighting against ourselves in a clumsy disconnect between intention and impact, wasting valuable time and energy and straining our relationships in the process.

Drawing from his most recent book, Peter points out the often funny places where our intuitive but counterproductive knee-jerk reactions get us in trouble, and he shows us how we can replace them with counter-intuitive but productive ones.

Peter shows how a few small, individual changes can transform an entire organization—moving it from a silo mentality to collective leadership, and he offers practical ideas, tools and tips to help people work together in a way that they, and their entire organization, profits. Peter will show audiences:

• How to build a foundation of strength and inoculate themselves so they don’t get triggered by the things that other people do and say

• How and why we often they say the wrong things, and what to do and say instead to build relationships and get the most important things done together

18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done

We squander a tremendous amount of our potential—and organizations waste a tremendous amount of their people’s potential—by focusing on the wrong things or not following through on real priorities. It’s not that people don’t try hard enough, it’s that their efforts don’t reap the benefits they could.

Drawing from his book, 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done, Peter sets out the new, simple rules for leading in a way that brings focus to an organization and makes the best use of everyone’s talents.

Organizations succeed when people use every part of who they are to take care of their top priorities in the most efficient way possible. In this counter-intuitive speech, Peter shows us how getting people to fit in or fix their weaknesses works against us. Instead, he tells leaders to help people embrace their weaknesses, assert their differences, leverage their strengths, and pursue their passions.

In this engaging, story-based and very practical talk, Peter offers ideas, practices, tips, mind hacks and gentle nudges to help leaders bring focus to their people and their organization. Peter will show audiences:

• An 18-minute plan to manage their day—empowering them to get the right things done

• How to get traction, stick to their focus, ignore non-priorities, avoid the allure of unproductive busyness, and master their boundaries so they can resist distractions

• How to build a plan that places people at the intersection of their strengths, weaknesses, differences and passions, maximizing their success and impact on the organization

Speech Topic 3:

Leading with Emotional Courage

Everyone in an organization—no matter their level—has the opportunity to lead. Unfortunately, most don’t. There is a massive difference between what we know about leadership and what we do as leaders. What makes leadership hard isn’t theoretical, it’s practical. It’s not about knowing what to say or do. It’s about whether you’re willing to experience the discomfort, risk and uncertainty of saying or doing it.
In other words, the critical challenge of leadership is, mostly, the challenge of emotional courage.

Emotional courage distinguishes powerful leaders from weak ones. It means standing apart from others without separating yourself from them. It means speaking up when others are silent and remaining steadfast, grounded and measured in the face of uncertainty. It means responding productively to political opposition—maybe even bad-faith backstabbing—without getting sidetracked, distracted or losing your focus.

In this engaging and interactive talk, Peter not only shares real-life stories of emotional courage in action, he gives audiences a taste of it. Peter shows audiences:

• Why emotional courage is so important, and examples of its power

• What it feels like—experientially—to have emotional courage through fun and effective exercises

• How to grow emotional courage to take bolder moves in their work, their lives and the world

Speech Topic 4:

Managing Change without Resistance

Seventy percent of all major change efforts fail, mostly because of rampant fear, anxiety and resistance. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Far from inevitable, resistance is a direct result of how we manage change.

Peter Bregman has successfully designed and executed major change efforts, involving thousands of people, at some of the world’s most prestigious companies of all sizes.

Peter’s experience proves that resistance is optional, an unintended consequence of the way most leaders try to execute change. His key insight: “People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.”

Peter shows us how and why most change is executed poorly and most change management is counterproductive—creating stress in the leaders and resistance in everyone else.

In this speech, Peter teaches a simple mind shift, and a few basic, easily implementable strategies that can completely transform how managers and leaders lead—and how the whole organization perceives—change. Change instantaneously becomes an opportunity to deepen engagement and ownership; to create a workplace where everyone feels responsible for the success of the entire organization.

Peter illustrates this lively, participative speech with a case study of a successful change involving 2,000 people globally in a large financial services firm. He shares:

•Three change rules that must underlie any organization change effort

•How to use the “Engagement Continuum” to diagnose and describe their own change initiatives

•Seven strategies for engaging the workforce during a time of change that shift the responsibility of change from leaders to the people who must take the daily actions to make the change successful